The 12 Weirdest Things People Are Adding to Their Coffee

It is fortunate for humanity as a species that coffee as a beverage, given our absolutely prodigious consumption of it across the world, is actually a significantly “healthy” addition to most lifestyles. Sure, there are potential downsides, not least of them the addicting potential of caffeine, but beyond the caffeine question, moderate consumption of coffee has repeatedly been shown to convey certain benefits. Black coffee is rich in antioxidants such as polyphenols and hydrocinnamic acids, which play a role in maintaining heart, liver and endometrial health. Coffee can even help people process blood sugar more efficiently, which can lower the risk of progressive diabetes–provided, of course, you’re not putting a bunch of sugar in your cup. Yes sir, black coffee is a pretty incredible beverage.

If you’re clinging to hipster credentials, or especially a trend-chasing health nut determined to craft some sort of pristine, Chris Traeger-esque body temple, however, you’re probably not going to be content to simply accept the health benefits of your daily cup of joe as they currently exist. No, you’re going to need to add a bunch of additional odd things in your coffee. Note: It is important (as far as I can tell) to then loudly talk at everyone within earshot about what you’re putting in your coffee, so they’ll be aware of exactly how they’re falling behind in the quest for performative healthiness if they’re not immediately following suit.

I kid, I kid. In truth, there’s an incredibly wide and unusual array of other ingredients that people add to coffee all over the globe, for any number of reasons. Some are indeed questionable fads pushed by pseudoscientific health-seekers, projecting an odd mixture of Dr. Oz and New Age spirituality. Others are long-established niche tastes based on culinary traditions of countries as disparate as Finland, Vietnam and Puerto Rico. Turns out there’s a lot of unique coffee preparations out there that the average person knows absolutely nothing about.

In fact, when it comes to putting stuff in your coffee, it feels like the act itself of wondering “I wonder if anyone has ever put this in coffee” is itself sufficient to immediately summon that scenario into being. Like a food version of the internet’s infamous rule #34, just saying something like “hot sauce in coffee” causes it to spring into existence. And so, I decided to gather together an impressive menagerie here of all the unconventional things people are putting in their coffee around the globe, starting from the relatively conventional and innocuous, and heading toward the progressively more incredulous.

1. Honey

There are a lot of ways out there to sweeten coffee. A lot of folks use granulated sugar, diner-style. There’s a whole galaxy of artificial sweeteners. Cafes specializing in espresso drinks often use simple syrup, which mixes better into cold drinks.

But honey? Nature’s own sweetener feels like a bit of an odd choice to use in sweetening your coffee, and it was one I’d never considered until I saw someone do it right in front of me back in Atlanta–this person asked for honey in a restaurant and loaded up their coffee cup like it was no big deal, which made me wonder just how many other people prefer their coffee this way. Turns out it’s not particularly uncommon, though it does seem like a polarizing choice. Some drinkers would argue that the floral or fruity flavor profile of honey just inherently clashes against the darker, roasty tones of coffee … but at the same time, many styles of coffee also have floral and fruit notes of their own, so is it really that much of a stretch? At the end of the day, it achieves the same sweetening aims. Ditto for using other syrups, such as maple, in your coffee–same argument.

2. Protein Powder

The daily nature/ritual of drinking coffee makes it attractive as a way to cram other supplements into our diet. After all, other than water, is there any other beverage that many of us drink every single day? And so, I guess I can’t blame people for saying “well I’m going to drink it anyway, I guess I might as well put my protein powder/fiber powder/other supplements in there.” There are definitely people doing this every morning.

Has this ever made anyone’s coffee taste BETTER? I rather doubt it. The clumpy, powdery nature of most of these supplements seems to me like it would make drinking the resulting coffee slurry into a chore rather than a pleasure, but I can’t blame a person if it’s the one way they can make themselves participate in that particular health regimen. Of course, I’d probably say “why not just mix it with water and leave the coffee alone?”, but to each their own.

3. Salt

Adding salt to coffee is one of those perfectly mid-2010s internet “life hack” concepts that one blog would write something about, and then a dozen legitimate publications would quickly follow suit looking for virality. Or at least, that’s how it feels to me, because I’ve seen a lot of these types of stories over the years. Supposedly, adding a tiny bit of salt directly to the coffee grounds can help subdue an impression of bitterness in the resulting brew … although if you’re using decent coffee in the first place, and brewing it correctly, that really shouldn’t be a problem you’re having. You can also theoretically sprinkle a tiny bit into a cup of hot coffee, but how much exactly is one supposed to use when salting their coffee? Moreover, is the typical American diet not overly full of sodium as it is? This just feels like overthinking your morning cup of joe to me.

4. Citrus and Carbonated Water

Puerto Rico is blessed with a bevy of unconventional coffee rituals, but the idea of adding sparkling water and citrus slices to coffee is one that we’ve actually written about in detail at Paste, and assistant food editor Samantha Maxwell was quite impressed with the results. This certainly seems like it would make for an interesting preparation, though I think it would be one I would prefer to have over ice than hot–a hot, carbonated beverage would be an unusual experience indeed. It feels like lemon might be a conventional choice for the citrus slice, but lime is apparently most common in Puerto Rico, and I think this could yield a bright, spritzy coffee beverage at the end of the day. I would at least be curious to try this preparation.

5. Butter/Ghee/Oil

Otherwise known, of course, as the legendary “Bulletproof Coffee,” one of the 2010s’ most viral and hotly debated health fads. It still feels like people don’t have the greatest understanding of what exactly Bulletproof Coffee was/is–it’s first and foremost a brand and a fad diet, created by entrepreneur Dave Asprey, as a way to sell his own proprietary coffee. The consumer was meant to buy this coffee and then blend it with both clarified butter (ghee) and MCT (medium chain triglycerides) oil, conveniently also sold by Asprey. The idea is that this would give you a big dose of various healthy fats in the context of your morning cup of coffee to provide you with more energy and satiety. The associated Bulletproof Coffee diet would essentially have people use this coffee in place of meals to encourage weight loss. Of course, the actual, purported health benefits of ingredients such as the MCT oil remain largely unproven.

As is often the case in these scenarios, what I fall back on wondering at the end of the day is “why coffee, in the first place?” If MCT Oil actually conveyed these advantages, why not just use it in more conventional parts of one’s diet where you typically would use oil? Why is the recommendation not to make salad dressing with the oil, but instead to drink it in coffee? The answer is presumably just “Because people drink coffee every day, and we can sell more oil that way.”

6. Olive Oil

But wait, maybe we’re just not using the right types of oil in our coffee? Bulletproof Coffee suggests you load up your morning java with one type of highly saturated fat, but Starbucks is betting on the more health-friendly image of olive oil instead. Taking a cue from the niche popularity of olive oil-infused coffee beverages in Italy and Greece, the world’s biggest coffee chain launched their “Oleato” series of oil-containing hot and cold drinks at limited stores in 2023, and expanded them to many more stores nationwide in 2024. Reviews I’ve seen have been pretty rough, with many customers seeming to compare the mixture to an industrial-grade laxative and bowel lubricant, but Starbucks still seems to be forging ahead in launching the Oleato line all around the U.S., which indicates there must be some people out there who really enjoy this. Want to take bets on whether this will still exist on menus five years from now?

Ah, who are we kidding, Starbucks will probably have yak butter or Soylent Green lattes by that point.

7. Black Pepper

Adding dry spices to coffee is generally pretty common in other cultures outside of the U.S., particularly in preparations such as Turkish coffee, which often has cardamom, or Mexico’s Café de olla, which may include cinnamon, orange peel, anise or cloves. Just dumping some ground black pepper into the cup at the end? That’s a little bit more out on a limb, if you ask me. Nevertheless, you can easily find people advocating online for doing exactly that. As is so often the case in these scenarios, I find the argument for doing so a little fundamentally hard to swallow, as the author claims that the addition of black pepper will–like the previously mentioned salt–somehow temper the bitterness of your coffee. Is that a thing that black pepper is known to do? Never can I recall hearing a chef say, in my culinary journey, that pepper can be used to “reduce bitterness” of a dish. I would be more sold if the author was saying they were adding black pepper in order to add earthy or fruity flavors, or even some spicy heat to the coffee. But the main selling point is offsetting bitterness?

Moreover, does half a teaspoon of ground black pepper in a single cup of coffee seem like a whole lot of pepper to drink to anyone but me? No one is going to accuse you of trying to hide the pepper in that brew, trust me. It’s going to be noticeable.

8. Eggs

Ah, now we’re getting into the really interesting “stuff people put in coffee” territory. As it turns out, egg is used in very different ways in several coffee preparations around the glob. In Vietnam it’s the yolks that are used, combined with condensed milk and sugar to make a desserty coffee beverage that is effectively a coffee custard when you really think about it. Probably not the healthiest thing in the world, but I’d wager it probably tastes delicious.

The absolutely zany style of Swedish egg coffee preparation, on the other hand, leaves me scratching my head. In this style, and entire egg–shell and all–is whisked into the coffee grounds to create something with “potting soil consistency” before the brewing process has started. The intended function is to bind all of the coffee together, and the grounds are then tossed directly into a pot of boiling water. The grounds then all end up clumping together, and when the coffee is finished boiling the whole thing is passed through a fine strainer. The purported result is “extra clear” and light coffee with notable clarity and low bitterness. Again, how many of these preparations involve trying to reduce the bitterness of coffee? And how many drinkers are hoping for clarity in a black beverage? I’d be curious to taste this coffee preparation in order to see if it’s notably different, but the time consuming nature of making it this way, boiling in a stock pot on the stove, makes it unlikely I’d ever get around to trying it.

9. Cheese

Ah yes, cheese and coffee, together at last. Whereas most of these ingredients have been at least marginally liquid in nature, and able to mix/blend into a cup of coffee, finally we have a scenario where people are just tossing entire cheese cubes into their cup and calling it a day. And once again, we have not one but two different preparations of this–one from Finland, and another from Puerto Rico.

In Finland this is apparently known as kaffeost, “coffee cheese,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. The cheese used for the preparation is called leipäjuusto or “bread cheese,” occasionally referred to as Finnish squeaky cheese in the U.S. It’s a sturdy, waxy cheese that is typically warmed before eating, such as popping cubes in a microwave. Or, just dump them into your hot coffee, where the cheese reportedly softens and absorbs the drink, but does not actually fully melt. You can then drink your coffee before reaching in with a spoon to fetch out the now soft and coffee-soaked cheese cubes to eat. It’s a pretty strange idea on paper, but it’s not like most of us are totally averse to adding dairy to coffee in the form of milk or cream. So why not cheese?

Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico they have a somewhat similar preparation that is literally called, as you might imagine, cafe con queso. I even managed to find a TikTok of a woman talking about (and consuming) this preparation, dropping small pieces of yellow cheese into the coffee to get them melty, before scooping them out with buttered crackers. Frankly, I don’t know quite what to make of this, but I think I can guess what one’s cardiologist would think of it.

10. Hot Sauce

If there’s one subset of food geeks you can always count on to take things too far, it’s definitely chile heads/pepper heads. Their single-minded drive to insert Capsaicin (the spicy chemical compound in chile peppers) into every conceivable corner of the food and drink world leads them to explore avenues that the rest of us would never dream of in a million years. Many have addictive personalities, and have inserted chile consumption into their lives as a way to replace more genuinely damaging chemical dependency, something I watched an entire documentary series about earlier this year. And so, I am not the least bit surprised when I read that some chile heads are doing this. Frankly, I would be far more surprised if I could find no evidence of hot sauce obsessives putting spicy stuff in their coffee, as that would represent an unusual failure of imagination on their part.

Can we safely assume that for the rest of polite society, this would probably not be great? I’m not feeling the need to test this one out for myself.

11. Fish Sauce

Fish sauce in coffee. Now we’re approaching the final frontier, folks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is another contribution from Vietnam, although it can be hard to find properly translated details in how fish sauce is used in coffee there. I have seen some reports that it may be involved in the roasting process (alongside clarified butter?) for some Vietnamese coffee makers. But don’t fret, you can also find preparations that are simply including pungent fish sauce in the final product, or even dusting the coffee with dehydrated fish powder. Yeah, I think this one might represent a bit of a challenge to the staid American palate. It seems less likely that Starbucks will be trying to appropriate this, in comparison with olive oil coffee.

12. Soy Sauce

Trying to search online for whether people are putting soy sauce in their coffee is tricky, because most of the results that are returned are instead about soy milk or other soy products/sweeteners, rather than the fermented soy sauce condiment we know and love. However, I’d just like to state for the record that at least one cafe in Indonesia was definitely serving soy sauce coffee at one point, and that’s good enough for me.

If they were doing it, they’re probably not alone out there. And if there are things as fanciful as soy sauce coffee, fish sauce coffee or cheese coffee out there, just imagine all the other incredible and absurd coffees we probably haven’t discovered yet. Try it for yourself: Think of an ingredient and google “____ in coffee.” You may be pleasantly shocked or horrified by what you uncover.

Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer and resident beer and liquor geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more drink writing.